Prof. Eric R. Claeys

Eric R. Claeys is Professor of Law at George Mason University. He has written widely in the fields of property, private law, and constitutional law. Professor Claeys has published book chapters on Lockean labor theory and on tort theory in different books in the Oxford University Press Philosophical Foundations of Law series. He contributed to a recent Harvard Law Review symposium on “The New Private Law,” and he currently serves as an adviser to the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Fourth) of the Law of Property. Professor Claeys’s current research interests focus on flourishing- and labor-based natural rights justifications for property—in American property theory, in intellectual property, and in contemporary regulation of shale gas exploration and hydraulic fracturing.

Professor Claeys graduated from Princeton University and the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. After law school, he clerked for the Hon. Melvin Brunetti, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and the Hon. William H. Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States. He practiced litigation in Washington, D.C. for three years, served as a writing fellow at the University of Chicago School of Law, and taught at the Saint Louis University School of Law. He has been a member of the Mason Law faculty since 2007.

Professor Claeys’s main teaching interests include Property, Jurisprudence, and Intellectual Property. In recent years, he has also taught Water Law, Remedies, Estates and Trusts, Trade Secrecy, Constitutional Law, and seminars on Lockean property theory and on oil and gas law.

• A.B., Princeton University
• J.D., University of Southern California